The Abominable: A Novel

two dead Tibetan ponies. The ponies had been shot in the head.”

“Shot!” cries out Jean-Claude.

Odell nods. “Kami told us that he and his younger cousins were alarmed. Nema would go no further, nor stay near the murdered ponies, so Desno took Nema back down the valley to Base Camp, while Kami kept climbing up the glacier toward Camp Two. He had to find the talisman, he said. He was also curious and somewhat alarmed for Bromley, who had been kind to him during his few visits to our camps during the trek in.”

“Did he see Bromley again?” I ask.

“No,” says Odell. “Kami found his talisman—set into the stones in the sanga they’d set up at Camp Two, right where he thought he might find it.”

“What exactly is a sanga again?” asks Jean-Claude.

The Deacon responds. “The rock walls we and the porters build at Camp One and above. They enclose the tents we use and keep things from flying away when the winds rise. The porters often sleep within sangas that have only a ground cloth and a pole-supported tarp for a roof.” The Deacon turns back to Odell. “What did Kami see?”

Odell rubs his cheek. “Kami admitted to us that he should have turned back to his cousins as soon as he found his talisman, but instead, out of curiosity, he continued climbing toward Camp Three.”

“That must have been dangerous with the monsoon snows covering the crevasses,” says Jean-Claude.

“That’s the odd thing,” comments Colonel Norton. “We’d expected the monsoon to hit full force by the first week in June…indeed, there were some serious flurries during the last days before Mallory and Irvine’s final effort. But the monsoon hadn’t arrived at Rongbuk when we finally left on sixteen June, nor had it arrived when Kami says he was back there on the twentieth of June. Some snow, very strong winds, but no actual monsoon. It didn’t really strike until we were all back in Darjeeling. Very odd.”

“Kami said that when he was at Camp Two, long before he got the last four miles up the glacier and through the last field of high penitentes, he heard what sounded like thunder from higher on the mountain, above the North Col,” says Odell.

“Thunder?” asks the Deacon.

“Kami found it very odd,” says Odell, “since it was a totally clear day—bright blue sky, snow plume off Everest’s summit clearly visible—but he said that it sounded like thunder.”

“Avalanche?” suggests J.C.

“Or pistol or rifle shots with echoes?” says the Deacon.

Norton looks shocked at that suggestion, but Odell nods. “Kami spent the night bivouacked on the glacier and in the morning light saw new tents at our site for Camp Three and, he said, more tents up on the ledge on the North Col where we’d set Camp Four. He also said that he’d seen three figures high up on the mountain, above where the Northeastern Ridge runs into the North Ridge. Far to the west, he said, between Steps One and Two… where a boulder was, he said. A boulder that looked like a mushroom. Three tiny black figures stood near that rock and then, suddenly, only one figure. Hours later he watched men coming down the sheer ice face from the North Col, using the rope ladder Sandy Irvine had cobbled together. He thought there were four or five descending.”

“It wouldn’t have been possible for even a sharp-visioned Sherpa to see figures so high on the ridgeline without field glasses,” muses the Deacon.

“Oh, yes,” says Colonel Norton with a smile. “Kami admitted that he’d ‘borrowed’ a good pair of Zeiss binoculars from one of the Germans’ empty tents at Camp Three.”

“And you left Irvine’s rope ladder behind?” the Deacon asks Norton. “Still in place on the ice cliff to the North Col?”

“We considered taking it down because it was dangerous, frayed and overly used,” says the colonel. “But in the end it was too much trouble to take it down, and some thought it might even last till our next expedition, so we left it where it was. Partially as a memorial to Sandy, truth be told.”

The Deacon nods. “I know you all must go in a moment, but what did Kami tell you that made you report the death of Lord Percival as told by a certain Bruno Sigl from Germany?”

Odell clears his throat. “Kami was frightened at the thunder, but stayed near Camp Three that second day just to see who the down-climbing figures turned out to be—hoping it was Bromley—but just as he was about to give up and leave the Camp Three area, he was shouted at in heavily accented English to stop. The man who shouted at him was holding a black pistol. A Luger, Kami thought. He stopped.”

“A pistol on Mount Everest,” whispers Jean-Claude. I could hear the revulsion at the idea in his voice. I felt it myself.

“At least it answers the question of who shot Bromley’s and Meyer’s little ponies,” I suggest.

The Deacon shakes his head. “They might have gone lame. Bromley or Meyer may have put them down themselves, planning to walk back to Tingri or Shekar Dzong with the yaks.”

“At any rate, poor Kami thought he was going to be shot for trespassing and for the theft of the Zeiss glasses,” continues Odell, “and he told us that he’d only hoped that his cousins would be brave enough to find his body and to bury it there in a crevasse with the proper ceremonies. But instead the German man with the Luger demanded in English—Kami had spent enough time in Calcutta that he could hear the German accent—to know who Kami was. Kami told him that he was a Sherpa with the Norton-Mallory Expedition and that he’d returned with others to retrieve a few forgotten items and that he was expected back.

“‘How many others?’ the German demanded.

“‘Nine,’ lied Kami, ‘including two sahibs waiting at the Rongbuk Monastery.’”

“Clever man,” the Deacon says.

“At any rate,” says Odell, “the German put his pistol away, identified himself as a European explorer, Bruno Sigl, and said that he was there simply reconnoitering the area with two friends—a number Kami did not believe because he’d seen the seven riding Mongolian ponies and four or five figures still on Irvine’s rope ladder—and that he, Sigl, had seen Bromley and an Austrian with Bromley, Kurt Meyer, carried to their deaths by an avalanche just twenty hours earlier.

“Kami had the presence of mind to ask where Sahib Bromley had died, and Sigl said that it had been on the mountain, above Camp Four on the North Col. Kami said that he was very saddened by the news—indeed, he wept in front of Sigl, partially, Kami admitted, because he knew the German had lied to him about where Bromley had died, and Kami still thought the chances were great that he himself would be shot dead by the German; but then Sigl merely waved him away and told him to stay away from Rongbuk.

“Kami complied,” concludes Odell, “literally glissading down dangerous stretches of the glacier until he picked up Nema and Dasno. The three cousins whipped their little ponies away from there and rode all through the night before coming across Shebbeare and me headed north toward the trade routes.”

“So we telegraphed tentative word of Bromley’s fatal accident to The Times from Darjeeling in our first full report,” says Colonel Norton. “Less than two days after we all took the train to Calcutta, Sigl himself showed up in Darjeeling and telegraphed his version of Bromley’s death to the Volkischer Beobachter in Germany.”

“That is one of the right-wing fascist newspapers, is it not?” asks Jean-Claude.

“Yes,” says Somervell. “A National Socialist Party paper. But Sigl was a respected German mountain climber, and the story was picked up almost immediately by the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, then the Berliner Tageblatt, and then the Frankfurter Zeitung. Sigl’s story was repeated almost verbatim by The Times less than a day after our own sketchy first report—and folded within our report in a way I did not much care for, to be honest.”

Norton and the others nod at this.

“But you do have Hazard’s, Hari Sing Thapa’s, the Tibetan pilgrims’, and Kami’s reports to back up Sigl’s claim that Bromley had gone to Everest and started climbing,” responds the Deacon. “I can give little hope or comfort to Lady Bromley about the reports of his disappearance on the mountain somehow being a mistake.”

“Perhaps not,” says Howard Somervell, “but it’s all deucedly strange. It leaves a bad taste in one’s mouth, no? And not just because young Percy was a nobleman.” Somervell slaps the leather arms of his deep chair. “Well, gentlemen, I believe it is time…”